• February 12, 2009

    for developers the best learning materials are third party tutorials

    It has always surprised me in the past that the best learning materials for any language or development technology are written by those who didn’t build the technology. The best book for learning C++ way back in the early days was not either of inventor Bjarne Stroustrup’s early books. It was Lippman’s excellent C++ primer. For years the best books on learning either Rails or Ruby were written by Dave Thomas (Agile Web Development in Rails and Programming Ruby) who didn’t have much to with developing either of the two technologies (although he did write the first version of RDoc). And in our opinion, his book was surpassed by later authors such as Fulton’s excellent The Ruby Way.

    The same is true for Rhodes. We were pretty happy with our tutorial. And we work pretty diligently to keep it current and accurate at all times. We’ve gotten a lot of kudos from developer users that its pretty good. But, lo and behold, we’ve been one-upped by one of our users, Makoto (who is working on a Mobile Twitter app that is available on GitHub). Check out his blog. Its devoted to “Ruby on mobile”, which as far as I know right now is basically just our technology. The first two articles very nicely summarize the development process with RhoSync and Rhodes, better than we did in the tutorial.

    2 Comments | Posted by admin


2 Responses to “for developers the best learning materials are third party tutorials”

February 15th, 2009, gela Says:

Last March while attending Bjarne Stroustrup’s lecture on modern C++ in Santa Clara convention center that gathered a crowd of a few hundreds people, I thought that the knowledge I am learning from the creator of C++ is quite unique in spite of my more than a decade experience of creating complex application in C++, working with top-notch developers and reading tons of books and articles. I learned about his vision for the future of C++, the road map for evolving the language, about good and bad design examples, which he collected over the years from numerous sources, about the overuse of some features and a lot of history. For me, as a software architect, it was the best and utterly indispensable learning material. Bjarne Stroustrup did not give any cookbook recommendations. That I can read from the other books. Is the same true for Rhodes?

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February 16th, 2009, admin Says:

I don’t disagree with anything you said. I think that Makoto’s tutorial is probably a bit better than ours for approachability and “from the user’s perspective”. I think that Lippman’s C++ Primer was a better tutorial than Stroustrup’s.

As to “vision for the future” of a technology, as with early C++ being about what was delivered initially, right now we’re pretty focused on getting people productive with our existing framework.

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